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Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS

The summer visit to Caltech is 4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The IMPULS team came to visit in July 2025. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and use math for something that's not just math class.
  • Absolutely we did real astronomy; we were looking at data and analyzing and categorizing things that others may not have done in the past or may have done less hands-on which makes me feel like a real astronomer because we are taking data and giving it purpose that others have not done before!
  • [Qualities needed for being an astronomer:] Perseverance; gotta be ok with failure and asking questions but also needing to be ok with working on the problem and beating your head against the wall (metaphorically or not) until the problem is solved or until you can put it down for the day and pick it back up. Also critical thinking and problem solving -- encountering problems is going to be common but finding out “why” or leaving some as “unknown” is pivotal; not everything needs to be finite but solving the questions even with “I don’t know but no one else does so its all speculation” is a much needed quality/skill to have. Leaving it as “meh idk and i'll just move on” doesn’t work for many problems.
  • [student: To be an astronomer,] I think it is important to have perseverance, confidence, and adaptability.
  • There was not a moment where I was feeling like the work we were doing was useless and the moments where teachers knew the info we got to practice how to teach students which was incredible too. And the fun energy that Luisa entertained/allowed made it just so much more fun and relaxing while still getting great science work done.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS